Manifestations by Christina Mengert

What it was, we called by name. We danced
in its tar like slow pilgrims, we ate

the bullet like wheat. We called it bullet
but ate it like wheat. Now it’s done.

We’ve planted sweat, painted walls, broken
the cavity of our own birth. How to speak a thing—

how to see it. On the authority of will,
the slow rendering of a world. Look here—

a seed. Look here, the body absorbing
its children, the fierce undulation

of being, for which the heart heaves its
patient blood—roaring silent, the body’s

thinking water, moving us to action,
articulation. Music flexed upward

under our eager feet. Call it wheat.
Call it harvest.

Christina Mengert is the author of As We Are Sung (Burning Deck, 2012) and co-editor of 12×12: Conversations in 21st Century Poetry and Poetics (University of Iowa Press). She lives and works in New York, where she makes films and teaches for Bard College’s Prison Initiative Program.